Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2004 9:27 pm

I need to set up a linux server here to host some test IMAP, POP, and SMTP server software. I'll be using this linux server for testing ZuggMail with various different email services.

Last time I installed linux was about 2 years ago (used Caldera). So, my question is, should I just go ahead and use my old Caldara CD again, or is there a better/easier alternative that I should look at?

I know some of you have more recent linux experience than I do (IceChild?) so any advice you can give me would be appreciated.

The system I'll be putting it on only has a 2GB disk partition available. I'll also want to use it interactively (NVidia graphics card) as well as via the command line.

Thanks for your help!

Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2004 10:48 pm

My personal suggestion would prolly be Fedora. It was originally known as the Redhat project, but has since had a namechange as now all of the Redhat products are enterprise level. Currently it's in "Core 1" and is remarkably stable, and it still sports the "Redhat Update Agent" which windows users should be fairly familiar with as being much like "Windows Update" (only better, since it actually will scout out any software that has been installed via it, or during the initial install, so it'll get your email servers as well)

It's 3 ISO's in full (located here: http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/1/i386/iso/ (you only need the .i386 isos)), but in server install mode, I'm pretty sure it's a fairly tight package ( < 1gb).

Anyfish, that'd be my recommendation as it's very easy to use, comes with the built-in updater, and is rather intuitive.

The official site for Fedora can be found at http://fedora.redhat.com/

Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 1:06 am

How's the dual boot support in Fedora? This is my old development computer that still has Windows 2000 on it, and I need to keep that for compatibility testing. So, does the Fedora installer detect this and install a boot manager properly that can handle this?

Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 1:25 am

The boot manager should have absolutely no problem detecting a Win2k partition and allowing a multi-boot. My personal recommendation for bootloader would be to go with LILO if given a choice. It's what I've used for years, and never had a problem dual-booting from any version of Windows. Just make sure you install the bootloader on the main drive (/dev/hda typically)

Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 3:05 am

If this is going to be dualbooted onto a main system, all the usual caveats here especially apply - backup like a mofo. The early concerns I had with installing any kind of distro was "where the hell does this install to?". Perhaps fedora accounts for it already, but the only way I knew where to install was the size of the partition itself - ignoring any drive names assigned to the partitions by a windows system (even if you pull out a HD and slap it into another windows machine, D: will still be called "data" if that's how it was labelled on the original machine). This alone has made it very easy for me to lose working installs of windows.

If the 2gb drive is the only 2gb partition on the computer, there obviously wont be a problem, you'll probably be asked to delete it and create up to 3 partitions (/, swap and potentially /home). I've made mistakes at this step and formatted the wrong partition and even initialised instead of mounting (again, losing /home stuff). Yeah it was my fault, I was just unfamiliar with the jargon after years of MS stuff (something to bear in mind, perhaps).

Essentially any new release will do what you need though there are big differences. Fedora is popular, as it works out of the box and installs everything you may want by default. Debian (an other popular platform) however installs the extreme bare minimum and expects you to install stuff as-you-go with tools like apt-get or aptitude to get desktops like KDE/Gnome on there.

I'll vote Fedora, just for its apparent ease-of-use.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

I've always been partial to mandrake because it's a newbies version of linux, like you can edit your firewall config in graphical editors and stuff instead of having to go through the textfiles, although you can do it thru the textfiles too if you want.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

And being a bit of a linux newbie, can anyone tell me how you can upgrade linuxes. Like... it seems every release you have to download 1.5 gigs worth of cd images and start again. Surely there's service packs and upgrades for linux, like a 50 meg download which upgrades you from 8.x to 9.0, and then a 20 meg download that upgrades you from 9.x to the latest 9-series.

Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 6:14 am

If you use debian, you can do apt-get update, followed with an apt-get dist-upgrade. That'll update all the installed software from the aarnet archive (which is the fastest one we can access down here, it fills my BP Cable link).

Older redhat flavours have a process called up2date that does the same thing, unsure about Fedora.

The kernel is a little bit hairier, but once you get the hang of it you'll wonder what the hassle was about ;)
---
Both of those are run in the shell as root, but if you insist on doing it inside a gui there is a program called synaptic on Debian (probably used on all Linux flavours) that will do the exact same thing.

Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 7:04 am

up2date works in Fedora as well, and Mandrake has an online update utility. Debians apt-get is by far the best solution I've ever seen, as it's very efficient, and quite packed with options, however for the newer users it's kinda overkill and difficult to use.

As for knowing where things install, it'll automatically tell you the format of each partition on the system, and the naming convention is pretty simple once you actually understand how things are named.

/dev/hda1 is your first partition on your primary drive on your primary IDE channel.
/dev/hda2 would then follow suit as your second partition on the same drive (however, this is not always the case, the installer however will tell you what each label is assigned to)

All in all, especially with RPM based distros (Redhat, Fedora, Mandrake, etc), there is very little worry about corruption as long as you aren't installing anything but the bootloader on your primary drive. I've installed Linux on dual-boot systems numerous times without any corruption of my windows partition. Infact, this is a major concern for most distro groups, as they realize a great number of people dual-boot especially keeping windows around for games.

Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 7:11 am

Another good thing about linux is it really doesnt care where you install it, as long as the bootloader knows where to look. Windows seems to want only the primary channel and refuses to install if this condition isnt met, yet linux will happily go on /dev/hdz

Magician Joined: 13 Oct 2000 Posts: 463

I dislike Fedora personally, but that's just my opinion. Instead, I would recommend Debian or Gentoo. I administered a set of Redhat servers for several years... and grew completely disgusted with Redhat in general. RH is much less graceful to manage than other distros I have used.

Debian I recommend based not on experience, but on what others have written. Debian is easy to install, use, and keep up to date. apt-get, according to hearsay, is very nice and has a large package selection.

Gentoo is what I have been using recently. Gentoo is a source-based system... in general, you compile everything you install. On a modern-ish system this is not really a problem, but it does make the initial installation rather slow. I run it on a P3-800 w 256 MB ram.

Installing applications in Gentoo is very painless... 'emerge packagename', and it downloads, compiles, and installs it for you. USE flags that you specify determine what options are compiled in... for example, if you have no sound on the system you can skip optional features being added that you will never use, like mp3 support in an IRC app.

Even better, keeping Gentoo up to date is equally painless... 'emerge sync', then 'emerge -uvD world', and it will check your system for anything that is newer, download the new version, compile it, and replace your existing version. Extremely painless, and remarkably error free... I've been updating for 8 months now, and have never yet had a program stop working when I updated. In theory, you can just update forever, even as new versions of Gentoo come out... it will just keep you up to date permanently. No reinstalling. Hell, unless you compile a new kernel, no rebooting.

That's my recommendation. The installation of Gentoo is long... you'll be wasting about 8 hours of your day doing it, though about 6 of those can be spent doing other stuff, but from then on it has the lowest administration hassle of any system I know.

I also like NetBSD, but I wouldn't recommend that except for paranoid sysadmins... less software availability and less hardware support, but a nicely paranoid system outlook where ALL services are off by default. Also has a nice ports system that is download-and-compile, though not quite as slick as Gentoo at keeping them up to date.

Raven

Posted: Thu Mar 25, 2004 3:10 am

A source-based system isn't what I want. I do not have the time nor desire to become that knowledgeable about linux. The problem with source-based stuff is when it fails to compile in which case you have a huge headache on your hands trying to get stuff to work.

I might take a look at Debian, but write now I already have the ISO files for Fedora ready to go and will try that first since it was the first suggestion posted. But the apt-get part of Debian *does* sound useful.

Mainly I want a system with a *good* installer. I want something like Windows that automatically detects the hardware and installs the proper drivers and stuff for it. Don't know if that exists yet, but that was my biggest issue with linux in the past. I'd get linux installed and then spend hours getting the proper video driver for X-Windows to work properly in anything other than 16-color VGA mode, installing sound drivers, installing network drivers, etc, etc. Caldera had the best installer I had seen at the time, although the video drivers were still a pain, especially on my laptop at the time.

Wanderer Joined: 04 May 2002 Posts: 52 Location: USA

I have to say even though you can't get the latest ISO's of Suse without buying it. The FTP install was pretty sweet and updating packages was also a breeze. I haven't actually had time to do anything with it, but just the setup and update was pretty impressive.

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

quote:
Originally posted by Zugg

Mainly I want a system with a *good* installer. I want something like Windows that automatically detects the hardware and installs the proper drivers and stuff for it. Don't know if that exists yet, but that was my biggest issue with linux in the past.

They've gotten fairly good a being a "Plug and Play" OS. I had a linux box a couple years ago and the mobo died on it. I put the hard drive in another system and it detected all of the hardware and ran fine. Both systems had older hardware on them, so they were more likely to be supported, but as I said, they're doing pretty good at the PnP type things.

Newbie Joined: 19 Jan 2003 Posts: 6 Location: USA

quote:
Originally posted by Zugg

A source-based system isn't what I want. I do not have the time nor desire to become that knowledgeable about linux. The problem with source-based stuff is when it fails to compile in which case you have a huge headache on your hands trying to get stuff to work.

This is mostly a misnomer...binary based distributions have dependancy issues which keep you from installing binary packages, especially any 3rd party binaries that aren't in the official package repository. Debian nicely avoids this by having practically every package anyone would ever want...Fedora has a much smaller package set, and I've quickly run into dependancy hell using it. Gentoo avoids it the same way Debian does, by having practically every package you would ever want (of course, they're just descriptions of how to compile a package). Overall, I would say a package is no more likely to fail compiling than it is to fail installing from a binary dependancy conflict. In the case that they both fail, source compilation is actually much easier to fix than binary dependancies problems, at least in my opinion (because binary dependancies problems involves compiling from source, then packaging into a binary, then installing that binary...it's the same as fixing the source problem, with more crap tacked on).

quote:

I might take a look at Debian, but write now I already have the ISO files for Fedora ready to go and will try that first since it was the first suggestion posted. But the apt-get part of Debian *does* sound useful.

Mainly I want a system with a *good* installer. I want something like Windows that automatically detects the hardware and installs the proper drivers and stuff for it. Don't know if that exists yet, but that was my biggest issue with linux in the past. I'd get linux installed and then spend hours getting the proper video driver for X-Windows to work properly in anything other than 16-color VGA mode, installing sound drivers, installing network drivers, etc, etc. Caldera had the best installer I had seen at the time, although the video drivers were still a pain, especially on my laptop at the time.

While apt-get is nice, Fedora has yum, which is similar, and has a much better installer. I've been using Linux for years, and the Debian installer can still confuse the hell out of me if I'm not being incrediably careful and staying on my toes. Mandrake or Fedora is my vote for you, since you won't need any packages except the official distribution packages anyway, since you're running a mail server. They will both detect all your hardware (I would be amazed if they didn't...so would Gentoo though (assuming genkernel and hotplug)) and they'll give you nice GUI config of your POP3/SMTP/IMAP server.

-- reltuk

P.S. -- Whatever you do, don't use Caldera...your copy is at least two years old, won't have the latest improvements, and Caldera is/was produced by SCO, which we all know is Satan incarnate.

P.P.S. -- I'm afraid I'm not really sure about the space requirements of any of these, but you would probably be hardpressed to use Gentoo on a 2GB partition anyway, since you need all the space to compile the packages, as well as install them. You might be hard pressed to get Fedora or Mandrake installed in that amount of space too, but I very much doubt it.

Newbie Joined: 19 Jan 2003 Posts: 6 Location: USA

On another note, why are you using Linux at all? You seem to be a strong advocate of Windows, and are clearly more comfortable with it. Why not use any of the available Windows mail servers (free or non-free...)?

--
reltuk

Site Admin Joined: 29 Sep 2000 Posts: 389 Location: USA

Because many/most people who will be using ZuggMail on Windows will likely have a mail server that is running on a Linux server. Many ISPs are using linux or unix servers, NOT Windows servers. Until Windows Server 2003, Windows actually is a crappy mail server and subject to all sorts of problems. I know that every hosting company I've looked at for the zuggsoft.com server uses *nix servers for mail.

Certainly I'll be testing ZuggMail with various Windows mail servers...that's easy...I already have a WinNT server that I use for this kind of thing. But obviously I really need to test ZuggMail with the common servers used on *nix systems to ensure compatibility. And for that I need a linux system.

Currently my only linux system is the Caldera system that I mentioned I installed several years ago. But it's dual booted on my Development system, and obviously that's not going to work when I'm doing testing of ZuggMail. So, before I just installed the same Caldera system on another computer, I decided to ask here to see what people are using these days on linux since my experience was at least 2 years old.

So, to clarify, I'm not looking for a mail server to use myself, I'm installing linux so that I can test ZuggMail on as many different servers as possible. Each server has it's quirks, especially with IMAP. The reason so many email clients have poor IMAP support is that they don't test enough with different servers and handle the different capabilities correctly and handle the error returns correctly.

(oh, this is Zugg, not Chiara...was just fixing some stuff on Chiara's computer and decided to read the forums)

Novice Joined: 15 Nov 2001 Posts: 39

I reccomend SuSE. Has a wonderful installer, and handles multi-boot beautifully. Actually was quad booting Win ME, 2k, Debian and SuSE for a while.....

Do to a recent (few days ago) HDD failure, just have win XP on now.... but will soon add SuSE back in. I love that distro...